Resources (e.g. antibodies, model organisms, and software) reported in the biomedical literature often lack sufficient detail to enable reproducibility or reuse. For example, catalog numbers for antibody reagents are infrequently reported, and the version numbers for software programs used for data analysis are often omitted. The Resource Identification Initiative aims to enable resource identification within the biomedical literature through a pilot study promoting the use of unique Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs). In addition to being unique, RRID’s meet three key criteria, they are:

Machine readable.

Free to generate and access.

Consistent across publishers and journals.

The first step in this project is to test the feasibility of the system for a limited set of resources: antibodies, model organisms (mice, zebrafish, flies) and tools (i.e. software and databases) in the biomedical literature. Authors publishing in participating journals will be asked to provide RRID's for their resources. RRID's will be drawn from: